I have interviewed almost as many male students as female now, and I’ve noticed that there is a big difference in responses. Female students are more likely to be completely open to talking about their feelings and have apparently nothing holding them back from being vulnerable in front of me. Male students have been closed off in person and for a while I couldn’t figure out why. I have male friends who open up to me about their emotions and at first I felt insulted that my male interviewees weren’t being honest with me. But after talking with David about this problem, I realised that a man I don’t know is hardly going to open up to me. Men are stereotypically bad at talking about feelings, especially feelings that are less than positive. How could I expect them to open up to me, a complete stranger? I think I was being naive and not thinking about this properly.

So I followed up from my interviews with a Likert scale survey – David suggested having an even number on the scale so that there is no truly neutral answer. I also switched up the ends that disagree and agree sit at, so that they didn’t just go down the survey clicking the same button every time (I know I’ve been guilty of doing this in the past, as have my friends). Not all of the male students that I interviewed responded to this survey, which I expected but around 30% of them did. I set a hard deadline for them to respond by, in order to analyse the results and write this blog post, however the majority of them missed the deadline. This means that the results aren’t a reflection of the feelings of all of the male participants in my research. Of course I will update the results if any more responses come in.

From these survey results, I think it is clear that my male interviewees were much more comfortable talking about their feelings when I wasn’t there, and they just had to click buttons on their phone or laptop. Taking a person out of the equation, who was asking potentially stupid or invasive questions definitely helped, as did the anonymity.